More on Buddha and Wealth

Friend Adrian read my last post and wrote me this (he was gonna comment it). I think this is worth posting.

You can find (as the guy in the link did) stuff that the Buddha apparently said about money if you look for it hard enough, but it wouldn't be right to say that there's a big emphasis on it. The only part of the main teachings I can think of that relates much to wealth is the bit in the Eightfold Path about 'right livelihood', which essentially just says that whatever job you do, try to make sure it doesn't do unnecessary harm to yourself or others. There is also a precept on not stealing, which would be relevant to some kinds of wealth creation...

I don't think making money is seen as inherently 'good' or 'bad'- it all depends on a) how you got it, and b) what you do with it. If you can get disgustingly rich in an honest way and then do something really good with it, then fine. In practice I'd say most people have found that getting very rich usually involves either dishonesty or a lot of work (sometimes both), either of which will distract you from the things that really matter. (Winning Lotto might be another way, but not too reliable.)

Someone was saying that the Buddha was a privileged prince who needed to live in a rich enough society that he could drop out and seek enlightenment. The story goes, he was born a prince, but left home and lived on alms for the rest of his life. So not exactly a life of luxury. When times were hard the monks and nuns went hungry too. According to the stories they were sometimes offered animal fodder if things were bad, but they refused it if it was going to cause animals to go hungry. Once they are supposed to have experimented with eating bits off trees but found it didn't really do the trick. The Buddha apparently died as a result of eating something dodgy that someone had given him.

For more stories of his life, written in a pretty thorough but readable and unembellished way, I'd recommend Thich Nhat Hanh's book 'Old Path White Clouds'.

Mohammed, Buddha and Jesus on Wealth

So I got thinking the other day about the influence on praxis around materialism, poverty and riches by 'respected' religious figures. I'm fairly familiar already with some of what Y'shua (Jesus) taught.

So i thought i'd find out some of what Gautama (Buddha) and Mohammed taught. I was suprised that in my (brief) searching, they both seemed much more supportive of business and maybe even getting rich than i thought they'd be.

A couple of friends commented the following on a forum i hang out in

Gautama, if i recall, grew up as a very privlaged prince. The ability to dropout and seek enlightenment, requires a society that produces enough exess to facilitate such life styles.

Muhammad, I believe, lead a merchant caravan, and so probably had a strongly bourgeois (at least for his place and time) out look on life. Mohammed ran a business owned by his first wife. Strange to see how his example is ignored by some parts of the Islamic community as they restrict women's right to work.

http://www.globalwebpost.com/farooqm/writings/askme/islam/poverty1.htm

http://www.sut.ac.th/engineering/electrical/faculty/nimit/
articles/what_the_buddha_taught_about_money.htm

Is anyone more enlightened than i able to comment?

Looking in My Bin Today

Looking in my bin at work today

i see:

* two caramello wrappers
* a sushi takeaway box
* empty wrapper from my drugz
* printouts of interesting forums i was surfing
* a banana skin

And at lunch I went out and bought 68.5 metres of fluoro pink linen and a gothic cross.

It's been a good day :-)



listening to The Cardigans | Paralysed

Desiderata

I thought this was originally written by Francis of Assisi, but don't really know. Either way, I've always liked it so will post it here.

Go placidly amid the noise and haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.
As far as possible without surrender
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
and listen to others,
even the dull and the ignorant;
they too have their story.

Avoid loud and aggressive persons,
they are vexations to the spirit.
If you compare yourself with others,
you may become vain and bitter;
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.

Keep interested in your own career, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs;
for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;
many persons strive for high ideals;
and everywhere life is full of heroism.

Be yourself.
Especially, do not feign affection.
Neither be cynical about love;
for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment
it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years,
gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.
But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.
Beyond a wholesome discipline,
be gentle with yourself.

You are a child of the universe,
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be,
and whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul.

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful.
Strive to be happy.

What America Thinks About The World

Friend Bex alterted me to this one. I find this video hilarious - and staggering. If it's fairly edited footage... the world is in big trouble.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCkYfYa8ePI

My apologies to any of my US friends who are offended by this. I love you. You better move to a safer country sometime soon though.

===

I've just been booked to play Darkwave/EBM/Industrial at Club Bizarre on Feb 24. Cool!

listening to Front Line Assembly | Plasticity

MySpace, Cold Fusion and Asp .Net

I didn't realise Myspace has actually been in .Net for 9 months. I had assumed that its suckiness would go once they dropped CF 5.

From a user point of view, it's WORSE. More outages, more broken pages, more ugly fugly pages. And today it seems to be down altogether, 9 months after they moved to ASP .Net

I've been doing a little research, here's some excerpts from some forums. I will see if i can find any more recent comments. I realise these need to be read in context, but it's these ones that particularly interested me.


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Comment from April last year

Myspace is not Cold Fusion anymore. The have rebuilt it on ASP .NET v2 with the help of BlueDragon to maintain integrity to the old Cold Fusion Fusebox links. It looks like CF on the surface, but it is now 100% ASP .NET v2

Comment from March last year

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Hi everyone,

I work on the MySpace C# codebase...

To clarify, we wrote a custom configuration section that maps "fuseaction" URL parameters to ASPX extensions so that we'd maintain link integrity. The only place we aren't doing this is 'Browse' and certain other new features. Meanwhile, as Scott said the parts of the site that are running in ColdFusion are essentially doing so in ASP.NET 2.0 (via BlueDragon).

Thanks for the mention, Scott. It's been an exciting time putting this together and I can't imagine pulling this off on another platform.

Chris

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Comment from June last year

Thats right, MySpace made the mistake of moving to .NET, and now it's researching the next move since .NET has global reliability problems. MySpace is looking at Tomcat - Java - Hibernate - Wicket as a serious contender! Praise Java!


====

from http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/03/25/Handling-1.5-Billion-Page-Views-Per-Day-Using-ASP.NET-2.0.aspx
and http://blogs.business2.com/business2blog/2006/03/how_myspace_bea.html

Basically, MySpace needs a complete rewrite of the codebase from the ground up. If they haven't done that in .Net, then either

a) the decisionmakers are clowns and are listening to bad advice
b) .Net really doesn't cut it at that level (unlikely, given other big sites are written in it)
c) their developers and technical architects are crap.

It doesn't really matter so much which backend technology they use, they will all do the job one way or another. But they can't keep limping along trying to patch things.

I'd like to add that from a coder's point of view (having used .Net and learning PHP):

Cold Fusion 7 rocks.

Cold Fusion 5 was good, but not object-oriented. CF 7 is amazingly fast to code in, fully supports OO coding techniques and n-tier frameworks and seems to perform well at an enterprise level, so far. You can even get down and dirty and hack/code the Java engine which it's now based on. Can't wait to see what extra goodies Adobe pack into version 8. I am guessing there will be even more integration with Flash and Ajax technologies - which are already pretty darn cool in 7.


listening to Metallica | Enter Sandman

Blog Journalism | Cartoon Lust

Internet bloggers will be allowed to cover the criminal trial of former White House staffer Lewis "Scooter" Libby alongside reporters from traditional media outlets, a court spokesman has confirmed.

The arrangement is believed to be a first for a high-profile court case, although trade shows and political conventions have issued media passes to bloggers in the past several years.

more here

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/story.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10419169

===

I confess to lusting over 'nique from Sinfest. Was talking about this with Felyne.

One thing about art characters. They are always perfect. They never sweat, fart, leave their socks on the floor or get moody. (Except as far as their character normally does.) The perfect partner... a fantasy one. There's a lot to be said for that, given my sad love life over the last few years.



listening to Minuit | Claire

Goals for 2007

Friend LadyOfTheShadows from the US was hassling me about not having New Year's resolutions. I don't do NYR but my goals for this year, in no order are

1. Get completely debt free apart from debt to parents (that's for 2008)

2. Get a new, higher paying job.

3. Found BLISS and throw 2 - 3 successful parties.

4. Get at least 1 track released on an MP3 label.

5. Start my [censored-secret] metal covers band and get booked for the Movember gig in November.

6. Keep the fantastic progress up on improving my mental/emotional health.

7. Find some bandmates for my industrial project.

8. DJ Industrial/Goth/EBM regularly at Club Bizarre. Including my own production.

9. Restart and make money off my artist management agency.

10. See my son for longer periods and keep loving him deeply (not a hard one!)

There are others I may add later. Several of these I'm already on track with.

listening to xhile | liar (my own production, version 0.6)

Slayer Are Coming

I saw them at the town hall about 10 years ago and they are overpowering live. Also Mastodon are touring with them, who are the trendy new thing in metal. St James, April 21.

woohoo!

==

Edit: Talios has kindly let me know that Lamb of God are also playing at the Power Station on April 25. Thanks dude! April's gonna be a ROCKIN month.

listening to Primus | Professor Nutbutter's House of Treats

Avatar Movie Filming in New Zealand

Let's hope it's as good as the hype suggests it will be. The key thing will be a good story and direction, which is where King Kong fell down. I've generally liked James Cameron's stuff.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/1501119/story.cfm?c_id=1501119&objectid=10418452

listening to the bustling sounds of my workplace

Jesus With Rifle

listening to Cerebral | Kaline

Decisions Decisions

Back at work for day three. One of my goals this year is to save more money - I did pretty well last year, bought a car out my savings. Long term savings will be for a property methinks, but I also need some money in the bank if I'm gonna pay my remaining debts, promote any events and travel overseas this year too.

So I'm thinking... Big Day Out is coming up. And more and more, the only bands I really want to see are Tool and Trivium. So maybe I'll skip it and save $100. I've already been taking bus/train to work consistently which saves me big $$ each week.

I potentially have four events I will be running in the next 3 months. That's what happens when I get passionate about the music I'm involved with. My private party this Friday 12th (easy). Club Bizarre - industrial/ebm/goth - on Feb 23 (easy-ish provided I get some helpers from CB). Pink Moa at Kiwiburn Feb 9-12 (major mission). BLISS pre-launch party on March 23 (a significant amount of work). I will learn from past enthusiasms though. I want to be ready to drop the middle two lest I take on too much.

Deadline is fast approaching for Pink Moa at Kiwiburn too; if I don't get enough volunteers to help and to contribute money in another week, Pink Moa will be extinct until next year. I will still go to Kiwiburn, just as an ordinary camper and hope to meet some potential campmates for next year.

===

oh, and a nice blast from the past for me. Someone on a dance music forum posted asking about Wonderland (the last one was 3 years ago now). "I never got to go to Wonderland but am still hearing alot about it." Nice to think something I created made an impression.

listening to Tool | Sober (live)

Update on Iraqi Death Toll

A New Zealand academic has challenged the widely quoted estimate of a 655,000 death toll in Iraq, which was a US-led study's estimate, published in the Lancet, a British medical journal.

They say the study, by researchers from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, overestimated Iraqi deaths by a factor of three.

About 218,000 would be "closer to the truth," said Dr Gourley.

The Lancet study - attacked by President George W. Bush and others in his Administration - said between 392,979 and 942,636 Iraqi deaths had occurred because of the war, which began in March 2003.

The research was based on a survey of 1849 Iraqi households in 47 randomly selected clusters around the country, asking about death numbers in each of the homes before and after the war started.

These figures were multiplied to produce a number for the whole of Iraq.

Dr Gourley is a physicist who has been studying statistical patterns in financial markets and civil conflicts.

He said the flaw of the Lancet study was that it polled too many families who lived on main streets or their feeders, where bombings and shootings were more common than in back alleys.

Families living near main streets would have a higher death rate than those in more isolated areas, distorting the national estimate.

The authors of the Lancet study have defended their research methods, saying that they sampled deeper into residential areas than their written report suggested, and that areas other than obvious sites of violence had been included.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/category/story.cfm?c_id=82&objectid=10417599

listening to Front Line Assembly | The Blade

Twisted Sister?

OK. I admit it. I was a Twisted Sister fan when I was 15. They were everything a 15 year-old boy could want in a band. They were loud. They were rebellious. They wore funny clothes. They were the first ever live concert I went to - and are STILL the loudest. I can vividly remember my chest shuddering when the drummer thumped the kickdrums.

They eventually split up, and Dee Snider did some interesting stuff with movies, and appears to be a fairly intelligent guy. Although this latest episode makes me wonder. Unbelievably, they seem to have reformed and made - wait for it - a Christmas album. Sadly, they sound worse than when I was 15. And whoever edited their song and video needs to recall the phrase "less is more". Still, they are a legend in my own mind.
Check this out

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=De47fjH6RKY

listening to Twisted Sister | We're Not Gonna Take It (in my head)

Another New Year of Death

Back from the beach. I'm not ready for work yet, it'd be nice to have another week to feel really rested.

DiscoSis bought a paper yesterday. It has some really disturbing stats. 3000 US solders killed in Iraq, 22,057 wounded and

655,000 Iraqis believed to have died as a direct result of the the US-led invasion.

I couldn't quite believe that. But the figures are from an October report by John's Hopkins University, so I guess there is some credibility to them. Wow. How many people did Saddam kill? Surely this matches or even beats him (not counting the people killed in the Iraq-Iran wars).

And in the Independent, a writer alleges that the US, with UK support surrounded Fallujah in November 2004 and used chemical weapons - white phosphorus.

Two rather sobering things for me to investigate.

Addendum: After doing a little investigating I've found the following.

Saddam's Death Toll?

This website
http://www.moreorless.au.com/killers/hussein.html
seems to have actually done some research. They suggest Saddam was responsible for up to two million deaths. However, I am discounting those killed in the Iran-Iraq wars which - while horrible - are not necessarily the actions of an evil dictator. After all, many 'democratic' Western nations have killed lots of people in war.

The figures on the killing of political dissidents are more, er, interesting.

Mass graves discovered following the US occupation of Iraq in 2003 suggest that the total combined figure for Kurds, Shias and dissidents killed could be as high as 300,000

If this is accurate, then the western invasion has caused the deaths of twice the number of Iraqi citizens that Saddam did. In perhaps one tenth of the time. Perhaps pacifism isn't such a stupid position to hold after all?

Secondly, turns out the US did use white phosphorus bombs in Fallujah. Some suggest that white phosphorus bombs are 'chemical weapons', but the semantics are debateable. They are supposed to be just illumination devices, but there is evidence that Iraqi civilians were burned to death by them.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1108/dailyUpdate.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Phantom_Fury#White_phosphorus_controversy

Eighty countries have signed Protocol III of the 1980 Convention on Conventional Weapons, which bans its use as an incendaiary weapon against civilitan populations. The United States has refused to sign the treaty and is officially exempt - according to this http://www.nonviolence.org/2005/11/us_admits_to_chemical_weapons.php This website also has links to information on white phosphorus.



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Welcome to the new year all. On the upside, it looks like musically it might be a good one for me. I propose to party lots and not think about anything that might trouble me; I declare this the year of the Ostrich.




listening to Tool | Right In Two (prompted by n.e. lyfe)